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“It’s harmful because you’re setting expectations,” Hale snaps.

“Expectations I am more than equipped to honor, Miss Hale, should I ever yearn to.” I let the grin sharpen into something with teeth in it. “Unless you’ve developed a sudden, fascinating interest in me yourself? It does happen. I receive a great deal of interest. There’s something about a man who’s comfortable around the dead.”

Two of the guards snicker before they can stop themselves, and a furious flush climbs Hale’s pale throat as she informs the room, with great and unconvincing dignity, that she has no such interest whatsoever.

“A pity,” I say, entirely unbothered. “You’d find me a generous correspondent. I write beautiful letters. Mostly condolences, admittedly, but the form translates.”

“You are,” Hale states, “the single most unprofessional consultant I have encountered in eleven years.”

“And yet I solved your scene in under ten minutes,” I note, mild as milk, “which is more than the professionalism in this room has managed in three hours. Do let me know if the tradeever interests you. There’s always room at my table for someone who hates being wrong as passionately as you so clearly do.”

My smirk couldn’t get wider.

“Then let me enjoy flirting with my Sweet Peony,” I say, spreading my hands, magnanimous, “who is innocent, and who clearly hasn’t eaten a thing if she spent the morning on a pole. Yes?”

Vex nods—and on the perfect, conspiratorial cue, her stomach growls, loud and shameless into the hush.

Every eye in the room drops to her midsection. She shrugs, unbothered.

“What? I worked up an appetite.”

I am already reaching into my coat. I produce a granola bar, blueberry-filled, my own, smuggled past the morning checkpoint against precisely such an emergency, and toss it across the room. She plucks it from the air without looking, a small casual miracle of coordination.

“She can’t eat that,” a guard objects immediately.

“It cleared security on my person not forty minutes ago,” I reply, breezy. “Whole and sealed. But by all means—if you’re famished yourself, inspect it for poison. I’m sure my Sweet Peony would share a bite, if I asked nicely. Wouldn’t you?”

“No,” Vex says cheerfully, already peeling the wrapper, and then—because she cannot help herself, because the cataloguing is as compulsive as the breathing—she tips her head at the objecting guard and continues. “He doesn’t need it anyway. He ate lunch. He always eats at twelve-ten, on the dot, and takes a little snack at three-ten—Its in those charts about transfers and such. So by my clock he should still be perfectly full for another half hour, unless he’s simply bored and looking for something to chew on besides me.”

The room’s attention ricochets—from her, to the reddening guard, to me—and I let the delight show on my face, because there is no longer any reason to hide it.

Don’t we love a mischievous nosey Queen who stalks men like prey.

It seems as though no one is going to question how she acquired such details, so I assume it's best we move on.

“The innocent has spoken,” I declare amusingly. “Shall we wrap this up? I have a funeral to plan.”

And—because it pleases me, and because the look on Hale’s face when I do it is its own small reward—I add, to the room at large, “Do write that down, somebody. Cleared by chemistry, by alibi, and by the testimony of a guard’s digestive schedule. Three exonerations in under a quarter hour. I’d call it a record, but I’ve cleared the innocent faster, and the guilty faster still.”

The guards stir, recovering their purpose, and inform Vex it’s time to return to her cell.

She doesn’t resist, never does I’m told, which is its own kind of warning—but before they can move her, Doc speaks from the wall, quiet and absolute.

“See that a tray is delivered to her cell within the hour. A full one.”

No one argues.

Not like they would dare; there’s a register in Doc’s calm that ends conversations.

Vex turns those luminous eyes on him, soft for a flicker, and then she turns them on me, and the soft thing sharpens back into mischief.

“Nice to meet you, Silas,” she hums—my first name, unhurried, tasted, claimed—and it takes a discipline I did not know I’d need to keep my face from showing what that does to me.

She waves goodbye over her shoulder as the guards usher her out, sinking her teeth into the granola bar with frank, humming bliss.

“Blueberry,” I hear her whisper to herself, delighted, as she goes. “My favorite.”

As if I didn’t already know.